Young Writers Society

The roar of propellers came from afar, thundering across miles of dusky sky and desolate pastures before reaching the farm.

Jase paused, his attention stolen midway through herding chickens back into their coop. His ears pricked, focusing intently on the sudden disturbance. The noise was escalating, drawing closer at an alarming rate.

How fast is this thing going?

His navy-blue eyes scanned the horizon; a starless sky broken by a jagged sequence of silhouetted treetops. For several minutes he waited, ignoring the spring air biting at his muscular arms and turning his skin to gooseflesh.

Finally, a helicopter appeared between a break in the trees, barrelling towards the farm and the forest on the other side. He couldn’t discern its colour or any identifying marks, even as it was hurtling directly over him, steel blades violently chopping and churning the frigid air. A spotlight was attached to its belly, flashing to life as it passed overhead, throwing a grove of elms into temporary daytime. The trees rattled and swayed from the sudden passing force, startling a murder of crows into a clumsy flight, their disgruntled caws drowned by the gut-wrenching drone.

Then the helicopter was gone, disappearing over the forest and vanishing into the inky blackness beyond.

While the noise faded back to a bearable level, he imagined an elevated view of his surroundings: the forest that embraced the farm in a crescent hug, and beyond this, the range of sloping bluffs that lined the rocky coastline. There was nothing more out there besides a murky ocean too wide for the helicopter to cross. Therefore, he surmised, they were searching the forest. For what he wasn’t sure, nor did he have the faintest idea who they were.

“An avid birdwatcher?” Jase chuckled to himself, dismissing the interruption as if it were a regular occurrence. For a fleeting moment, he did feel a sense of urgency, a dreadful knot in his stomach. But he was able to shrug off the anxious feeling as easily as taking off a coat. It was an ability he had acquired over years of sequential hardships and a life too long to fit inside a sixteen-year-old boy.

Before he could return to his final task of the day, another noise blared across the farm. This one came from inside the large house behind him.

“STOP THAT RACKET!”.

The voice was elderly, coarse, more startled than angry.

“Shoulda saw that coming,” Jase told himself. The corner of his mouth lifted into a half-smile that was ruggedly accentuated by dimples. “No rest for the wicked, ‘ey Gran?”

He made his way through the garden—if a tangle of roots and weeds could be classified as such. The light shining from the panelled back door guided him like a beacon, illuminating his path with a yellow glow.

The house was constructed in 1808, and almost three centuries later, remained very much the same magnificent statement of the Georgian era. The only evidence of its longevity was the faded red brickwork, which failed to contrast with the white sash windows and white quoin edges as it once had in its former grandeur. The open gable roof bore a chimney on each side, and a horizontal sequence of three dormer windows on the front and back. Jase was fond of the building’s historic charm and its unapologetic juxtaposition to modern day designs. Before the property belonged to him it had been inherited through twelve generations of his family, and Jase understood—not speculated, but understood, as well as one could understand that the sun rises dutifully in the morning and sets restfully in the evening—that he would break this tradition.

He passed over the pillared threshold and into the kitchen, instantly greeted by the intoxicatingly sweet aroma of fresh bread and lavender. The kitchen was a superbly rustic room with battered pots and pans hanging over an oak island in the middle. The countertops were made from reclaimed dark oak, chipped and scarred from the various utensils he had dropped on them over the years.

Jase picked up a tired copper kettle and placed it onto the stove, then lit a flame underneath.

“Jasey? Is that you?” Grandma called from the living room. Her tone was different now; anxious. He supposed she must have already forgotten the manner in which she had woken up, and that’s to assume she remembered falling asleep in the first place. Her Alzheimer’s had deteriorated over the winter. She was incoherent on her best day, and so Jase expected her to be downright oblivious after an hour of medicine-induced sleep.

He proceeded through the hallway and leant against the doorjamb of the living room. Grandma was lying in her brown leather recliner, wrapped tightly in threadbare blankets, with fluffy pink slippers poking out from the bottom. The recliner was one of the only pieces of furniture in the entire house that deviated from the otherwise Georgian décor. After three centuries, a few comforts and gadgets of the modern era were likely to seep in.

“It’s me, Grandma. I’m almost done for the day. Try going back to sleep.”

“Try what?” she asked, her glassy eyes struggling to focus. Then at the drop of a hat, her muddled expression did a complete U-turn and her coherent, lucid self shone through. Her eyes somehow seemed clearer, as if a fog in them had been lifted. “Have you fixed the barn door?”

“Uh, Mr Roberts said he would drop some timber off tomorrow for me,” he said, frowning without understanding why he was. Then the answer struck him, and he asked, almost proudly, “hang about, Gran, how do you know about the barn door?”

Grandma hitched herself up, blankets falling away and revealing a long-sleeved silver night dress. She jabbed a finger in his direction as she spoke. “I know you think I’m stuck to this bleedin’ chair but guess again! Life aint passing me by just yet!”

Another helicopter whooshed across the farm, this one directly above the house, causing the window panes to rattle in protest.

“BLOODY NORA,” Grandma yelled, placing a hand on her heart as if to steady it. “That fucking racket will be what finishes me off”.

Jase didn’t know who Nora was, or whether she would approve of Grandma’s language (personally, he thought if you were diagnosed with dementia and lived to be so old you stopped counting, you deserved to use whatever language you liked).

“Ignore it, Grandma.” He fought to suppress a smile; a solitary dimple quivered on his cheek.

“What’s that?” She sank back into her recliner, dazed, slowly peering around the room as if trying to make sense of her surroundings. Her moments of clarity did not usually last long.

“TV: on,” said Jase, his expression now humourless. In response to the voice command, a rectangular portion of the living room wall—perfectly masquerading as the light pink wallpaper surrounding it—flickered to life and morphed into a wildlife documentary, immediately capturing Gran’s attention. The concealed television was another token of the 21st century, and what Jase had come to learn, a wonderful tool of distraction. Sometimes an even better sleeping aid.

“I’ll make you some tea, Gran.”

“Ta,” she said weakly, in a dream-like state. “Don’t forget mum and dad.”

The words hit Jase like a train, each syllable barrelling into him, obliterating him. He froze with his back to the living room, rooted to the spot as if he suddenly had to relearn how to breathe. Hearing Grandma speak about his parents like they were still alive, as if they could be relaxing in the next room, had a way of brutally debilitating him. It was because, for a nanosecond, he inherently believed they could be in the next room. It was the smallest, most fleeting of moments, but in that moment his parents were alive and everything fit together the way it should. The way it used to. But his brain would always catch up and shatter the fantasy, scattering the fragments across the universe.

You’ve let go of them, Jase reminded himself, eyes closed, refusing to let tears form in them. You’ve moved on.

To rub salt in the wounds, it was too damaging to Grandma’s mental wellbeing to correct her, to challenge her delusions. No, whenever she suffered a lapse in reality, the best reaction was to play along.

He remained facing the hallway so that she wouldn’t see the uncontrollable, twisted anguish and despair on his face. Somehow his voice was steady.

“I won’t forget, Grandma.”

When he opened his eyes, they were bright and tearless, the precise colour of a twilight sky. Just like that, he had shed his suffering, left it behind, forgotten.